Music

I think it’s about time that bands stopped doing the whole “Bonus Track” thing.

I was listening today to one of my favorite bands’ new album and after the last song, there was a 12-minute break and then a minute and a half of random guitar noises, drumming, and some distortion. Then the album ended.

That “hidden track” really isn’t a bonus at all. Bonuses are supposed to be something extra and good. Not something boring and pointless.

Bands need to realize that they didn’t improve their album at all by doing this. All they did was burn an extra 8 megabytes on my hard drive and iPod.

So, like, thanks?

There are two exceptions that I know of where I actually got some enjoyment out of a “Bonus Track”. The first was on Tool’s Undertow where each track between the end of the album and track 69 was a second of silence, and then track 69 was the most randomly absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

Then Stone Temple Pilots, on Purple, finished Kitchenware & Candybars with another completely off the wall, yet great, song that sounds sort big-bandesque about Johnny Mathis.

I feel like Patrick Bateman talking about albums this way.

Enough of the “Bonus Track”. It’s done. It’s over. Let’s just go back to normal tracks.

And if that thing you’re hiding at the end of the album actually just sucks, maybe hide it somewhere off the album.

Let’s just start a big festival in St. George, Utah. It’s the midpoint between Sundance and Coachella.

We can have it in the first week of March.

There will be skiing on sand dunes. If there aren’t sand dunes in St. George (I don’t know since no one has ever been there) we can just have them made. I’m sure we can get a corporate sponsor to pay for their construction.

There will be movie screenings and concerts, but they’ll be at least ten miles away from the actual festival so that they don’t interfere with the parties.

I mean, what’s the point of a movie or music festival if people actually have to pay attention to the music or movies and not just attend the parties?

There will be 700 parties in a three-day span so that none of them will be very good. Can’t have that. Better to just reenact the bar scene in “Swingers” – “This place is dead anyways”.

We’ll pretend it’s super amazing so that everyone feels like they must go or they’re missing the time of their lives. Then everyone will go and within a few years it’ll have completely jumped the shark, even though no one knows it…

…because when the whole point is just to go out of town and do a ton of drugs while pretending you love some band whose album you’ve never even heard, the rest is just secondary.